Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  He ripped his arm from my hold. “Second Battalion.” He didn’t bother with the sir or a salute. As he continued up the road, he turned. “Kraut counterattack coming.” He pointed north. Before I could ask how long or how far away, he was gone.

  So, I thought, we’re in for it now. I returned to the line of foxholes, all facing down the ridge to the Kall, instead of north to where an attack might come. “Pass the word; keep an eye to your right. Tell the machine guns to be sure they can track up the ridgeline as well as down to the river.”

  But we saw no one. The retreating infantry had simply melted away from a nonexistent threat.

  When Sergeant Jenkins arrived with the second squad, he dropped into my foxhole and pushed his helmet back, lit up a smoke, and reported, “It’s all hell back in the village. Soldiers streamin’ through in a panic. Officers stop ’em and try to set up a line. Minute they turn their back, the men they stopped are gone again.”

  “But we haven’t seen anything here, Sarge.”

  “It’s the shellin’, sir. They can’t stand it, and when it stops, they’re sure it’s because the Germans are comin’. They’s spooked.” He smiled at his use of the word. “Too many months in combat, the noncoms back there tell me.”

  “They talk to you?” I was surprised. “That’s good.”

  “Yeah, some good men back there. But the Twenty-Eighth Division has been in combat now for a month, and these three regiments have already lost and replaced half their men. The new ones just can’t stand it.”

  “How come our men are holding up?” My question was rhetorical.

  But Jenkins answered it. “Maybe they don’t know how bad it’s gonna get.”

  The airbursts began again the next morning at dawn. We were no more accustomed to them than we had been four days earlier. After only a few minutes, they stopped. Then to the north, out of the mist and fog that shrouded the remaining thick pines not yet splintered by the airbursts, we saw German infantry—at first a handful and indistinct, then hundreds of them, moving quietly. But they were not moving on our line. Rather, they were flanking us on the left, where the ridge was less steep, and they were heading straight for the village of Vossenack itself, five hundred feet behind our position.

  The entire squad was now aware of what was happening. These Germans would sweep into the village unless we could do something to alert the disorganized and demoralized Second Battalion and do something to distract the Germans, at least briefly.

  “Alright, I’m staying with the machine gun. Sergeant Jenkins, you man the other one. Everybody else, on my signal, stay low and move back to the village. Whoever gets there first, tell them one company, possibly two companies, of German infantry are on the way up toward the north end of the town.”

  I gave the signal, pulled back on the firing mechanism, and looked at Jenkins.

  He looked back. “Is this a good time to die, Captain?”

  We began training the two .50 caliber machine guns back and forth across the ridge. Our fusillade was probably out of range, but the demonstration was enough to momentarily distract the Germans’ left flank, which began heading our way. But then an officer blew his whistle, and the squad threatening Jenkins and me returned to the main unit. We continued to fire. When we had used up the ammo, I said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Scrambling up the track and into the eastern end of the village, we were surprised to see a line of tank destroyers spread across the field on either side of the road. The lieutenant in charge waved us toward the village. As the Germans came on up the slope, I could see the tank destroyers were readying to pull back into the woods west of town.

  I stopped and approached the major in charge. “Are you pulling out, sir?”

  “Yup, Lieutenant. There’s no tanks for us to attack, and we’re only drawing fire.”

  “But, sir, don’t you see that you’re the only armor in town, and it’s helping the infantry just to know you’re still with us?”

  “That’ll be all, Lieutenant.” He climbed aboard the first vehicle and began to lead them down the road out of the village.

  There were about sixty men spread out across the line in front of the village church when the Germans began their attack. We held them off for the better part of an hour, but then the threat of being outflanked led the Second Battalion commander, a captain, to order everyone to fall back to a line at the western edge of Vossenack. There we continued to hold up the German advance till nightfall.

  The next morning the church became the focal point of another German artillery assault. By noon it was nothing more than a steeple and a basement, protected from direct fire by barriers of broken masonry. There fifty or so soldiers were left, waiting for another counterattack. Eight of them were members of the 609th. When the attack came, we fell back as the Germans swept through the church and almost overwhelmed our fallback line at the western end of the village. Retreating, we called artillery down on our own position. That kept the Germans at bay long enough for the handful of infantry and engineers to reform a defense along the Second Battalion headquarters outside the village. And that’s how it continued for the next three days, as Germans and Americans attacked and counterattacked, exchanging ownership of the now ruined church.

  After those three days, the cloud cover dissipated. Finally, the battalion command, or what was left of it, was able to call in tactical air strikes against the Germans holding the eastern end of the town. But by the tenth of November, the word came down that we would have to withdraw completely from the sector. The entire Twenty-Eighth Division was standing down from its failed advance.

  It was a nighttime retreat, covered by intermittent artillery fire. We were debriefed by battalion G-2, but not very closely. The battalion didn’t want to know how badly its officers had been rattled, how quickly its squads and platoons had melted away at the hint of German advance, how disorganized its responses to orders had been. There were rumors that the division commander, Cota, was on the hot seat at SHAEF. But no one much cared at the level of the 112th regiment.

  When the G-2 was finished with me and my men, he looked over his notes. “Wrought? I’ve got a note here, says if you make it back, you’re to report to division G-2, Major Hurwitz. OK?” This was the Twenty-Eighth Division intelligence officer who’d gotten me and my men into the shooting war.

  “Yeah, Captain,” I replied. “Right after I find my men in the field hospital and get a night’s rest.”

  I found the major in a room at a large hotel in the middle of Aachen. I knocked and entered to a broad smile from Hurwitz, who rose as I saluted, saluted back, and extended his hand. It was a greeting I had not expected. Without thinking what it meant, I reached for his hand and shook it.

  “Well done, Captain. Put those bars back on your shoulders.”

  For a moment I did not even realize what he was talking about. My life as a captain seemed to have ended long ago and on another planet.

  He went on, “Your men did well. I’m writing a report. It’ll go up the chain of command, and maybe we’ll get a whole new source of combat infantry.” He was obviously satisfied with his achievement. But I was beginning to fume.

  “Major, in your little experiment, I lost sixteen men, friends I’d spent two years with, in a pointless battle with inadequate support, poor leadership, and cowardly white soldiers.”

  “Wait a minute. This was your idea. I didn’t write to my congressman.”

  I got control of myself. “Sorry, sir.”

  “Look, Wrought, that’s not why I sent for you.” He opened a file. “Evidently you are of more interest to the War Department than I expected. I am to ask if you speak Finnish.”

  “That’s right, sir. We spoke only Finnish at home when I was growing up.”

  “Well, here are some travel orders, Captain Wrought.” He handed them to me. “Top priority back to London, then to Stockholm, Sweden.”

  “Sweden? They’re neutral.”

  “Not my business, Wrought. Dismisse
d.” I was saluting when Hurwitz added, “I’ll see to your platoon. Don’t worry.” He returned my salute.

  That afternoon, the third one since he’d begun writing, Tom was ushered out of his cell for exercise. By this time he knew some of his fellow prisoners and was looking forwards to exchanging whispered witticisms. He rose from the bunk, and as he followed the screw out into the corridor, Tom surreptitiously tucked one copybook into the back of his trousers and the other at his front, under his prison jacket. If someone wanted to read them that badly, then there had to be a reason, and a reason not to let them do it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  As I climbed out of the C-47 onto the tarmac at Stockholm, I was still getting used to the scratchy wool of the civilian suit I’d been given with no explanation in London. The plane had come to a stop well away from the terminal, and no steps had been placed at the door. Instead, one of the airmen had opened it from the inside and invited the three passengers to jump down to the ground.

  There was an embassy car waiting for us, but no one spoke. When we reached the chancery building, each of us went our separate ways. My orders were to report to someone named Cole. The young Swedish woman at the reception desk pointed me up the stairs. “First door on the right.”

  There was no name on the door, but my knock was greeted by, “Come in.” A youngish man in a rumpled suit rose from a desk of papers. “Captain Wrought? I’m Taylor Cole, OSS station chief in Stockholm.”

  It was the first time I’d heard those words. “OSS?” My inflection carried my ignorance.

  “Sit down. Smoke?” He opened a silver cigarette case and offered me one. “OSS—Office of Strategic Services. It’s the War Department’s intelligence unit. Spies. And now you’re one.”

  I nodded. “So that’s why no one in London knew why I had been ordered here.”

  “Actually, Wrought, you’re not staying. You’re on your way to Helsinki. You’ve got Finnish. Maybe the only army officer in Europe who does.”

  “What am I supposed to do there, sir?”

  “Call me Taylor. I’ll call you Tom. OK? You know Finland was a province of Russia for a hundred years. Thousands of Finnish socialists and communists went back to Russia after the revolution, right?”

  “Yes, my mother told me my dad wanted to go back after the czar was overthrown.”

  “Do you have any idea how many did go back and settle in Karelia, between Leningrad and the Finnish border?” I gave him a chance to tell me. “The State Department thinks as many as ten thousand Finns went back from the United States alone. Anyway, it was a disaster for them once Stalin began to get a grip on the country. But they’re still there, a lot of them. That’s where you come in.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “The Finnish-Russian border is mostly trackless forest in the summer and blanketed white all winter. It’s the best way in and out of the Soviet Union right now, and maybe for the next few years. And it’s only fifty kilometers to Leningrad. The way the Russians have been behaving—not repatriating our POWs, denying landing rights for damaged bombers, liquidating the Polish resistance, industrial espionage in the United States, pussyfooting with the Japs—Washington is worried. We need to develop agents who can move across their border. That’s your job.”

  “Taylor, if you’re intelligence, you know I was a member of the US Communist Party for a couple of years in the ’30s.”

  “So what? You aren’t anymore. In fact, it’s practically a job qualification for what you are going to do. A lot of these folks have become former communists, just like you. They just didn’t have the luxury of telling the party where to get off like you did.”

  “One more question. What am I supposed to do? How do I do it? How do I find agents? How do I know I can trust them? How do I pay them?”

  “Tom, that’s five questions. Let’s take one at a time.”

  I spent the dark month of January 1945 learning tradecraft from Taylor Cole. Mainly it was common sense, the generous application of money, and a bit of overpromising. And I learned the answers to my five questions.

  It all involved a little recent history. The Finns had fought three wars in the space of five years. Russia had attacked Finland in 1940, when Stalin thought no one was looking. It was midwinter. At first the Finns won, since they knew how to fight in the snow and the Russians didn’t. But eventually Soviet manpower overwhelmed them. When the Germans attacked Russia in ’41, the Finns saw their chance to regain the lost territory. So they allied themselves with the Germans. That was the second Russo-Finnish war. When Russians swept west in ’44, the Finns fought for a third time, to force the Germans out of their country. That was the war none of us ever heard about. Finland knew it had to pretty well give in to any demand the Russians made, including purging the government of anyone with a record of hostility to the Soviets. They did it. But Finnish military intelligence services secretly kept themselves intact and in contact with the west.

  Taylor Cole told me that all I really had to do was make myself just visible enough in Helsinki. The Finns would find me. And that’s how it turned out.

  It was a few weeks after I arrived. I was buying rounds for veterans of the Russo-Finnish War of 1940 in a Helsinki beer hall. The rather spartan tavern served beer at long tables to men only and closed early.

  As we trudged out into the pitch darkness of midafternoon, one of my fellow drinkers leaned over to me. “Yank, we can keep drinking somewhere nicer if you’re still paying.” About forty, he was taller than me and strongly built, with a long face, dark hair that swept back from his forehead, and a deep cleft in the middle of his chin. I nodded at him, and we walked off together down several streets so narrow they were still banked in snow from a storm three days earlier. There was no sign announcing the much more interesting bar he brought me to, pine-paneled like a sauna, quiet and peopled by women as well as men.

  We took two stools at a counter and ordered vodka. My new friend picked up his glass and pronounced, “Finnish vodka, not Russian vodka. I’m Risto Paattinen.”

  “I’m Toomas Wrought,” I replied, using my Finnish first name. “What do you do, Risto?” My question was conversational, but his answer was not.

  “Depends which side of the border I’m on.”

  My ears pricked up. Meeting Risto was no accident. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, this side of the border I work in rural electrification. On the Soviet side, I repair tractors and trucks for cooperative farms.” He looked at me knowingly. “Works out pretty well. I’ve also got two wives, two families, who can’t really find out about each other. And plenty of excuses to travel.”

  “Risto, we’ve just met. Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’ve got friends in the ministry of war. You’re OSS, and they told me to help you.” I remained silent. “I’ve got something you fellows can use. A dozen different ways to slip in and out of the Soviet Union.”

  For the next two years, Risto made me a wildly successful OSS station chief. As the Soviets set up more and more stooge governments in the eastern European capitals, Risto was bringing out more and more information from diplomats in the USSR that could never reach the Finnish diplomatic bag.

  I really had nothing much to do except serve as the postman. Risto was the cutout between me and a stable of agents in Leningrad; I never met a one. But I didn’t mind; Helsinki was fun. I caught up on three years of reading, and I began to think about what I wanted to do with my life. Before I had quite decided, however, the whole matter was taken out of my hands.

  One day in December of 1946, there was a knock on my door. It was a messenger from the US embassy. He asked me to sign for the letter, which I did. I opened it to find a travel warrant and a letter separating me from the OSS and from the US Army with an honorable discharge, and nothing more.

  All there was to do was to leave a note for Risto in the dead drop we’d use when immediate contact was impossible. Then I packed my bag and took a train to Sweden. All n
ight long I wondered what I had done or what might have happened. Never a reprimand, never a countermand, never a cross word from Taylor Cole in Stockholm. What had I done wrong? Without checking into a hotel, I went from the station to the embassy. Taylor was not yet in, and I cooled my heels in the lobby, shivering every time the door opened to let in another jet of the Stockholm air.

  At 9:00 a.m. precisely, in he came, saw me sitting at a bench, looked again in recognition, and crooked a finger. I followed him back to the same anonymous office where I’d met him in January 1945. He didn’t invite me to sit.

  “You should be on your way home, Wrought.” He looked around his desk and found a piece of paper. “Yup. Relieved as from immediately.”

  “Well, Taylor.” He was calling me by my surname, but I was going to remind him of how he had addressed me the last time we’d met. “I just thought I’d stop and say good-bye. Maybe ask for a reference, given that there were no complaints about my work.”

  He responded to the irony in my voice. “Look, Tom, I can’t say much, but you must have an idea how Washington politics operates.”

  “Sorry, none. I’ve been insulated from it since I enlisted, before Pearl Harbor.” That had been almost exactly five years, I realized. “It’s almost three years since I was stateside.”

  Taylor dropped his pen, let his chair swivel back, and pointed me at the chair in front of his desk. “Look, the OSS is trying to survive the postwar changes—Truman, Republican majorities in Congress, most of all J. Edger Hoover and the FBI. It’s not even calling itself OSS anymore. We’re trying to hide in the War Department—OSO, Office of Special Operations.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”